Lately I’ve been watching and reading a lot about Jim Henson and his incredible team of puppeters. In the process I came across this beautiful video and song performed in his memorial. I thought it was worth sharing.
Year: 2020
The expert
Hello
If I’m not great, I’m good
Frank Sinatra speaking about a lesson he got from Benny Goodman:
“He was away off in the corner, everybody was kind of sitting around, having a snip of booze or something like that; and I walked over to him and he was just kind of quietly noodling, and I said… every time I see you Benny you are practicing… why do you do that so often? He said purely because.. Frank (he said) so that if I’m not great, I’m good, and I never forgot it… because it’s true. If you work hard at it all the time and you have a slow period… whether it’s your own emotional problem at the moment or you are lazy, something happens one day and you say… well I don’t feel like working as hard as the last night… you work, and it’s still good. It’s better than the other guy in other words. It’s never below the standard; and I try to live up to that.. when he told me that I thought… what a marvelous way to put it.”
Frank Sinatra
https://www.instagram.com/p/CA6O4IznzP1/
The Age Of Anxiety
Who we really are
The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.
Sirius Black
J. K. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Building is how we reboot the American dream
In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.
Marc Andreessen
It’s Time to Build
Floating in my mind
How Websites Evolved Back to Static HTML/CSS/JS Files
I find it fascinating that we are back to generating separate HTML/CSS and JS files and then putting them on a static file server — the CDN. It has been a decade long effort and as we come back to where we started, I feel like we are at a whole another level (a spiral?).
Param Aggarwal
Jaron Lanier speaks about the work of Ted Nelson
The mind boggles
I love discovering new words and learning about the definitions and meanings behind it. The word “boggle” is quite fascinating.
According to the Merriam-Webster’s definition:
- to start with fright or amazement: be overwhelmed
// the mind boggles at the research needed - to hesitate because of doubt, fear, or scruples
- to overwhelm with wonder or bewilderment
// boggle the mind
(Overwhelming is another one of my favorites)
The word boggle basically is telling us that wonderment and fear are connected. That to marvel and to doubt are related feelings of the same nature. That to be amazed can be frighting. To be astonished can cause you to hesitate.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite games was called “Parole”. In Portuguese that means “palavra”, or in English “word”. It was a very simple game. Take a few plastic cubes that have printed letters. Shake these cubes in a container, and organize them in a plastic plate. Now turn an hourglass for one minute and write as many words as you can with those random letters.
After moving to the US, I was delighted to learn that this game actually existed here too (long before it went to Brazil actually). And of course you probably know the name of “Parole” in the US: Boggle.
The IndieWeb
The Website Obesity Crisis
It has been almost five years since this presentation by Maciej Cegłowski. Since that time, the real topic seems to be forgotten.
We talk about website optimization and static sites, but we continue to forget about his main issue. Simple informational and text-based websites that are still loading 1.5-5MB (just to display news or articles).
It seems to me that with the mobile revolution (both in devices and in network speeds), the ideas outlined in that presentation have completely faded into obsolesce. Yet, the web could be much faster if we just had better tools and best practices to address the problems.
Perhaps adding that Google Maps embed to your restaurant site is not needed if the user can just get a link to it. Maybe we could find better tracking tools that don’t need to load twenty different JS scripts in the background.
Over the past few years, the results of these technical choices are clear. People decided to search for tools to remove these bloated sources. Ad Blockers continue to rise, pop-ups to deactivate ad-blockers are needed for editorial industries to economically survive.
Simply trying to discover who’s tracking us, and what data is being sent to advertising networks has become an impossible task. New initiatives, such as the Brave Browser, appeared to try to solve some of these issues. But the massive results we expect are still not there.
As 5G networks start to be rolled out world-wide (slowly), we have another great opportunity to address some of these lingering issues. The real question is… Are we going to take this chance? And when?
What makes a good life?
There isn’t time — so brief is life — for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving— and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Mark Twain
Are you human?
Ze Frank: Are you human?
Robin Williams
This is an outstanding documentary. Highly recommended.
The man in the arena
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Pixar
The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.
– John Lasseter
An optimistic view of the web
Eric Bailey wrote a great article over at CSS Tricks outlining some of the key factors that make the web such a strong platform.
I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings.
Eric Bailey
The “state of the web” is an ever-changing topic that interests me a lot, and it is refreshing to see an optimistic point of view focused on the strengths of the web, rather than the issues surrounding it.
Link to the article below:
2020 books
One of the goals I set for myself this year was to read more books than watching news. I decided to share the list here so I can better track it later. I’m planning on at least one book a month:
- The Ride of a Lifetime – Robert Iger [done]
- The Little Book That Beats the Market – Joel Greenblatt
- The Intelligent Investor – Benjamin Graham
- The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined – Steven Pinker
- Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl
- The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity – Amy Webb
- Sapiens A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
- The Power of Habit Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business – Charles Duhigg
- The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties – Paul Collier
- Rising Strong – Brené Brown
- Reclaiming Conversation – Sherry Turkle
- These Truths: A History of the United States – Jill Lepore
Bonus, if possible:
How the Internet will (one day) transform government
I keep several playlists on my YouTube account. My favorite one is called just “gems”. In it I keep a few videos that I often look back, because they had such an impact on me when I first watched it.
Clay Shirky’s TED Talk from 2012 (below) is one of them. He is thinking about the power that systems such as git could have in governments. But the part that really struck me the most was when he went all the way back in time to show this concept, using the Philosophical Transactions, from the Royal Society to explain the idea.
I’ve worked in the past digitizing archives from the Royal Society, and to hear him making those connections all the way to modern version control systems was just fascinating to me.
Watch it below:
The video and transcripts can also be found here
George Carlin – A ticket to the freak show
500 Days of Summer
A few years ago I watched 500 Days of Summer for the first time, and it was so powerful to me at that moment, that I had to watch it again, just a few days after.
In 2019 the movie completed 10 years since it was released, and I feel I should watch it over and over again.
I’ve seen a couple of videos on YouTube celebrating and remembering the movie. The two videos below are with the main actors in the movie — Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
These videos are worth watching because they explain the real perspective from the film, which is primarily (almost solely) focused on Joseph’s character Tom.
“Hear what she says. She is very honest.”, Zooey Deschanel, talking about Summer, her character in the movie. That is the key to this movie, and what made it so powerful to me at the time. Tom was not really listening during this relationship, and that caused a series of effects that ultimately lead to the beginning and end of the movie.
Just watch it, it will make more sense after. I should do the same, and then watch it again every time I come back to this post for a reminder.
The rapid growth of the Chinese internet – and where it’s headed
A great insight to start the New Year
Think about that for a minute, because it’s really important. Somewhere along the way, we’ve all bought into the idea – without consciously realizing it – that to be motivated and effective we need to feel like we want to take action. We need to be eager to do so. I really don’t know why we believe this, because it is 100% nonsense.
Yes, on some level you need to be committed to what you are doing – you need to want to see the project finished, or get healthier, or get an earlier start to your day. But you don’t need to feel like doing it.
Heidi Grant
I believe this is such a simple concept, that sometimes it feels too easy to think about, and we want to look for a better idea, hack things and find a more complex explanation.
The fact is that the “act of doing” things consistently, regardless of inspiration or motivation more often than not leads to better results. Maybe not better, but definitely to results. I think the “better” part comes from perfecting the act by repetition or iteration.
In 2020, I want to experiment the idea of producing more and more, and see if the aggregate will lead over time to something greater.